Feature

The Inexpressible Apocalypse

Maybe St. John Did, After All, Write the Final Word by Alan Jacobs

I begin with a cartoon by the great Roz Chast that appeared in The New
Yorker some years ago. It bears a headline: “The Four Press Agents
of the Apocalypse.” I can no longer remember what the first three press
agents say, but the words of the fourth I recall perfectly: “It’s
a-comin’, and it’s gonna be big.”

We Puff or Sneer

It is always painful, I know, to be forced to endure the unpacking of a joke,
but please bear with me: this one, I think, is worth unpacking. The idea behind
the joke, of course, is that press agents devote their lives to making small
things seem big, to blowing things up—“puffing,” as the ad-world
jargon has it.

“Puff Graham,” the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst commanded
his subordinates half-a-century ago, once he saw the charisma of the ambitious
young evangelist—little imagining that long after people had forgotten
Mr. Hearst (save, perhaps, as the model for Orson Welles’s Charles Foster
Kane), Billy Graham would still be famous. Sometimes what the press agents puff
can inflate beyond all expectation, and sometimes, believe it or not, there
arise persons or events vaster than our powers of inflation, denigration, or
praise.

Some years ago John Updike wrote, “We cannot imagine a Second Coming
that would not be cut down to size by the televised evening news, or a Last
Judgment not subject to pages of holier-than-Thou second-guessing in The
New York Review of Books.” I must admit that when I reflect on the
Last Judgment, I never wonder what the New York Review of Books would
think about it. Presumably they would commission Garry Wills to write a long
essay demonstrating how God had, through a combination of administrative mismanagement
and mendacity, bungled the whole affair, which in any case should have been
left to an ad hoc bipartisan task force overseen by a major activist/intellectual—Hillary
Clinton, say.

In any event, if the cartoon mocks our inability to imagine events larger
than our powers of puffery, Updike suggests our inability to imagine events
beyond our powers of sneering diminution. For Updike, this deficiency of imagination
stems from a governing fact of contemporary cultural life: “Our brains,”
he writes, “are no longer conditioned by reverence and awe.” One
might extend that remark by saying that our brains are conditioned by irreverence
and a resistance to awe.

But there is a more fundamental point to be made than either Chast or Updike
indicates: It is, simply, that the Apocalypse cannot be narrated. Apocalypse
in the true sense is the end of history, and the end of history is the end of
narrative; it is beyond our powers of storytelling because it is beyond story
itself. Having said this, I may well have made the only point I am capable of
making on this subject. But that is a question that I will return to near the
end.

The validity of my claim that the Apocalypse cannot be narrated may only be
tested once we are sure what we mean by “apocalypse.” It seems to
me that, when that term is employed in literary discourse, it is used in two
different ways, with different degrees of legitimacy and usefulness. It is used
both for stories that depict the end of the world (these are usually secular)
and for those (usually Christian) that depict the events leading to the Last
Trump. The second will be our main subject.

The End of the World

First, we have depictions (usually uninformed by Christian belief) of the
“end of the world,” by which is usually meant either the end of
humanity or the end of life on this planet. Thus Neville Shute’s
On the Beach or Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz,
to take a couple of famous examples. Narrative fiction is the typical, though
not the exclusive, venue for such stories. (It is interesting to note that this
kind of book is a staple of high-school reading lists.)

But such stories only occasionally deal with the actual arrival of The End.
Instead, they tend to show that end narrowly averted, as in Michael Chabon’s
wonderful novel for young people Summerland, or to show the new and
fragmentary human society surviving the wreckage of the old.

The latter sort of story can even offer a kind of American optimism, the myth
of Starting Over and Getting It Right. I would not call A Canticle for
Leibowitz an optimistic work by any means, but there is the possibility
of a certain sober hopefulness in the way it concludes, with human beings leaving
this irredeemably broken world to begin anew elsewhere. It offers only the possibility
of such hopefulness, though—one is equally free to imagine us doing as
much damage to our new world as we did to this, our original habitation.

There are still bleaker visions. Two centuries ago Lord Byron wrote an astonishing
poem, “Darkness,” that portrays something like the death of the
universe:

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguished, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;

For a time some creatures manage to survive in this emptiness, but soon enough
no life remains:

The world was void,
The populous and the powerful was a lump,
Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless—
A lump of death—a chaos of hard clay.
The rivers, lakes, and ocean all stood still,
And nothing stirred within their silent depths;
Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea,
And their masts fell down piecemeal; as they dropped
They slept on the abyss without a surge—
The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave,
The Moon, their mistress, had expired before;
The winds were withered in the stagnant air,
And the clouds perished! Darkness had no need
Of aid from them—She was the Universe!

It is an utterly chilling vision—even in A Canticle for Leibowitz
and On the Beach some life remains on the ravaged earth, if not human
life—but I would argue that even Byron’s depiction of ultimate horror
is not truly apocalyptic, for at the heart of apocalypse is (as the word’s
origin teaches) the idea of revelation, of unveiling. These works describe catastrophes,
even what for the human race is the greatest of catastrophes—its annihilation—but
in them is no element of disclosure. Nothing is unveiled.

They do not reveal anything to us we do not already know: That we are morally
and now technologically capable of destroying ourselves and much of our world
is hardly news. Such tales describe not the culmination, the transformation,
the apotheosis, or the demonization of history, but simply its trickling into
nothingness—history on its worst day. It is quite sad if you happen to
be part of the story, just as it is quite sad when a business you work for closes
its doors for the last time, but such an ending is not, strictly speaking, significant.

The Last Trump

The second use of the word describes depictions (usually Christian) of the
events leading up to the Last Trump: Such stories tend to deal not with the
End itself but with dramatic events that point towards it, that indicate its
imminent arrival. In these, theological positions have literary consequences,
because the way one conceives the nature of the End Times affects the way one
tells the story. In particular, as we will see, certain kinds of stories emerge
from Protestant dispensationalist thought that do not, or do not easily, consort
with Catholic eschatology. And in the limits of these stories we see, I think,
the reason apocalypse cannot be narrated.

In this second category would be Michael O’Brien’s Father
Elijah, a Catholic work, and Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins’s dispensationalist
Left Behind books. (The last book in the series, Glorious Appearing
, however, broke with tradition on this point. The writers actually possessed
the chutzpah, if that is the right word, to attempt to depict, in straightforward
narration, the absolute end of history and the triumphant return of the Judge
and King whose judgments brook no appeal and whose kingdom will have no end.
That is more than St. John dared to do.)

Books in this category, while they vary greatly in literary and theological
quality, do take the notion of unveiling, disclosure, seriously. We see in them
what is distinctive about the Christian apocalyptic vision in the strong sense
of the term, the sense associated with St. John’s Revelation: that the
ultimate Unveiling is so comprehensively shattering that the very history whose
meanings are suddenly visible must instantly end.

The history of this world, so the Apostle seems to teach us, cannot bear the
weight of its full meaning. The arrival of that meaning in its completeness
marks the end of the history itself. But such completeness is not instantaneous:
The unveiling occurs either with a slow waxing of revelatory power or else gradually,
in stages, according to one’s eschatology.

In Michael O’Brien’s Father Elijah (the first of a series),
the priest of the title tells a friend: “The apocalypse is not melodrama.
If it were, most people would wake up and see the danger they are in. That is
our real peril. Our own times, no matter how troubled they may be, are our
idea of what is real. It is almost impossible to step outside of it in
order to see it for what it is.” This claim illustrates O’Brien’s
belief that, as he puts it in the introduction to thenovel, “the
‘end times’ begin with the Incarnation of Christ into
the world, and there remains only a last battle through which the Church must
pass.” Thus the first letter of John: “Little children, it is the
last hour.”

For O’Brien, while John’s Revelation contains elements of prophetic
prediction, it is primarily a guide to what now is, to the circumstances
in which Christians at this very moment struggle. What is revealed is, above
all, the meaning of the spiritual environment we now inhabit. For those closely
attentive to the book of Revelation—and, O’Brien suggests, to John
Henry Newman’s four sermons on the Antichrist, written when he was still
an Anglican—there is an imperceptible clarifying of vision, a disclosure
that enlightens the spirit as the dawn enlightens the physical landscape.

To Make Us See

I imagine that this passage from Newman’s second sermon on the Antichrist
was strongly in O’Brien’s mind (and in that of his protagonist):

What we want, is to understand that we are in the place in which the early
Christians were, with the same covenant, ministry, sacraments, and duties;—to
realize a state of things long past away;—to feel that we are in a sinful
world, a world lying in wickedness;—to discern our position in it, that
we are witnesses in it, that reproach and suffering are our portion,—so
that we must not “think it strange” if they come upon us, but
a kind of gracious exception if they do not;—to have our hearts awake,
as if we had seen CHRIST and His Apostles, and seen their miracles,—awake
to the hope and waiting for His second coming, looking out for it, nay, desiring
to see the tokens of it, thinking often and much of the judgment to come,
dwelling on and adequately entering into the thought, that we individually
shall be judged.

These he described as “acts of true and saving faith.” The “one
substantial use of the Book of Revelations [sic], and other prophetical
parts of Scripture,” is

to take the veil from our eyes, to lift up the covering which lies over the
face of the world, and make us see, day by day, as we go in and out, as we
get up and lie down, as we labour, and walk, and rest, and recreate ourselves,
the Throne of GOD set up in the midst of us, His majesty and His judgments,
His SON’S continual intercession for the elect, their trials, and their
victory.

Newman is an interesting figure to invoke in this context. He writes at the
outset of these four sermons that, in interpreting Revelation, “I shall
follow the exclusive guidance of the ancient Fathers of the Church” and
yet he admits soon after that “in this matter [that is, prophecy] there
seems to have been no Catholic, no universal, no openly declared traditions;
and when they [the Fathers] interpret, they are for the most part giving, and
profess to be giving, either their own private opinions, or uncertain traditions.”

There were, in fact, at least two major traditions among the Fathers regarding
the interpretation of Revelation: one historical, primarily futurist, seeing
the book as presenting predictions of coming events; and the other being (by
contrast) allegorical and ahistorical, understanding the book to offer always
relevant disclosures of the condition of the Church amidst its enemies. (The
second was promoted primarily by the Donatist theologian Tyconius and then affirmed
and elaborated by, of all people, Augustine.)

Newman strikes the Augustinian note, with its emphasis on how “we are
in the place in which the early Christians were.” But elsewhere in his
four sermons he considers which of Revelation’s prophecies have been fulfilled
and which remain to be fulfilled. Newman is divided between the futurist and
the allegorical teachings of the Fathers.

And so is O’Brien. It is in the historically minded spirit that the
pope asks Elijah, “Do you understand that in those days every human being
will be put to the test? Each will be asked to render an account of himself?
Do you realize how universal this trial will be? How dreadful will be the cost
of faithfulness?” But in the novel few are so aware; few have
the veil lifted from their eyes; few sense that history may be moving towards
its culmination.

Persecution of the Church increases without anyone paying particular attention,
in part because the suffering is subtle, cast in the forms of education, therapy,
and training; and also in part because so many friends of the Antichrist (witting
or unwitting) shape the policies and acts of the Church. The pope is beleaguered
even within the Vatican, while the nameless president of an emerging world government
carefully builds trust and accrues power. The world will end with
a bang rather than a whimper, but most will be quite shocked when the bang happens.

LaHaye’s World

But things are very different in the theological and fictional world of LaHaye
and Jenkins. By the fourth book in the series, Soul Harvest—which
covers a period rather early in the seven years of the Tribulation—the
writers are at pains to insist that there can be no uncertainty about the identity
of Nicolae Carpathia or his hostility to God and God’s people. Their theological
mouthpiece, the evangelist Tsion Ben-Judah, writes, “If there are still
unbelievers after the third Trumpet Judgment, the fourth should convince everyone.
Anyone who resists the warnings of God at that time will likely already have
decided to serve the enemy.”

If O’Brien’s Elijah believes that “it is almost impossible
to step outside of [our idea of the world] in order to see it for what it is,”
LaHaye and Jenkins contend that at a certain point in the career of the Antichrist
it will become impossible not to see the way things really are. The
line between Christ and Antichrist will be unmistakably drawn; people will need
to do no more than decide which side of the line they’re on.

And once they decide, it often becomes impossible to rescind that decision,
as we see in the series’ penultimate novel, Armageddon:

“I’ve changed my mind, want to take it all back . . .”

“But you can’t.”

“I can’t! I can’t! I waited too long!”

Rayford knew the prophecy, that people would reject God enough times that
God would harden their hearts and they wouldn’t be able to choose him
even if they wanted to.

Incidentally, I have no idea what “prophecy” LaHaye and Jenkins
are referring to. We are told in Revelation 9 that those who survive the plagues
released by the seven trumpets do not repent of their sins, but that offers
no warrant for this scene. In any case, this scene reveals that in the world
of Left Behind, contra O’Brien, the Apocalypse is
melodrama. People do indeed “wake up and see the danger they are in”—but
many of them respond to that danger by blaming the Christians for all their
misery and siding with the Antichrist.

To borrow Dante’s terms, in the Left Behind books the Evil
One abandons froda for forza—fraud (deceit) gives
way to the raw display of force. In the tenth book, The Remnant, the
point is reinforced when the hero thinks, “For most people, doubt was
long gone by now . . . there were few skeptics anymore. If someone
were not a Christ follower by now, probably he had chosen to oppose God.”

It might appear that this picture of the End Times contradicts at least one
of St. Paul’s statements, since in his second letter to the Thessalonians
he writes of “those who are perishing” that “God sends them
a strong delusion, so that they may believe what is false.” But in the
reading of LaHaye and Jenkins, I infer, the “strong delusion” concerns
the outcome of events, not their character.

That is, people will not be deluded into thinking that they are
servants and lovers of Christ when they are in fact his enemies, but they
will be deluded into believing that Christ can and will be vanquished.
Thus, unbelievers in the last days mistake the balance of power in the universe,
but do not justify their actions by self-deceiving claims that their cause is
Christian or godly or virtuous.

Not a Thriller

The Left Behind books eliminate the element of self-deception as
described by Paul and bring the two sides of the fundamental conflict into straightforward
and open opposition. When LaHaye and Jenkins do this, and thereby turn their
account of the End Times into an utterly conventional thriller, with all the
apparatus familiar to readers and viewers of that genre, they are making literary
decisions consistent with their theology. If the Last Days are intrinsically
melodramatic, then a melodramatic literary genre—with its high suspense,
intrigue, games of hide-and-seek, and perfectly differentiated Good Guys and
Bad Guys—provides the right way to represent it, at least until the Glorious
Appearing, when, presumably, the rules will change.

By contrast, the thriller elements in Father Elijah—disguises,
fake identities, spies, electronic surveillance—seem, to me at least,
rather at odds with O’Brien’s theology. Because of his distinctive
talents and experiences, and the role he agrees to play for the pope, Elijah
is almost the only person in the world experiencing the onrushing end of history
as a thriller. I found it hard, when reading the book, not to keep recalling
that in this book the vast majority of the world’s faithful Christians
haven’t the first idea how close they are to the Lord’s return.

There is a sense in which O’Brien ought to be writing about them rather
than about a figure out of melodrama like Father Elijah. He has said, echoing
the sermon from Newman I quoted earlier, that “wanting neat fortune-telling
packages about the near future is really in a sense undermining the spirit of
vigilance. A great mistake is made by writers when they predict events, or interpret
too subjectively the details and personalities of their times.” Yet these
are just the matters about which his hero is, and must be, obsessively concerned.

Being so concerned with them does not come naturally to Father Elijah, though,
the way it does to the Tribulation Force in the Left Behind books,
and when both the scene and the tone of the novel shift and Father Elijah finds
himself in a place of contemplation and prayer, where the meaning of events
is disclosed to him through mystical visions rather than through clandestine
meetings in shabby restaurants and secret documents hidden in ravaged houses,
one senses that the priest and his creator are both more comfortable, more at
home. The eternally relevant aspects of John’s Revelation evidently appeal
to them more than the predictive ones.

I have given here but a cursory glimpse at these two fictional worlds; but
it is enough, I hope, to show that theological positions have literary consequences,
that the way O’Brien on the one hand and LaHaye and Jenkins on the other
understood eschatology had specific consequences for their narratives, and that
Protestant dispensationalist thought produces a different story than does Catholic
eschatology.

Elijah’s Tension

But I want to return to Father Elijah for a few moments, to consider
that book in more detail, because, as I have already suggested, its fictional
method stands in a kind of tension with its eschatology. There is no such tension
with the Left Behind books: Their narrative world is consistent with
their authors’ (melodramatic) eschatology, and if you find the latter
appealing, you will probably not have much quarrel with the former.

About them I will have little more to say, except this: LaHaye and Jenkins
favor a step-by-step interpretation of the End Times derived from their belief
that the visions given to Daniel and to St. John appear in strict chronological
order, with each vision corresponding to a particular historical event. What
this means for their fiction is that, from the very first book, the immediate
coming of the Antichrist and the subsequent Tribulation are assured.

In this variety of dispensationalism, once the Rapture occurs, the Cosmic
Clock starts ticking, and it will continue to tick (punctuated by a series of
events that are utterly unsurprising to all readers of Scripture) until, seven
years later, Christ returns in glory. Therefore, throughout the books we get
many sentences like this: “They still had nearly five years until the
glorious appearing of Christ to set up his thousand-year reign on earth”;
“Buck longed for the end of all this and the glorious appearing of Christ.
But that was still another three and a half years off”; and “From
the commotion down front and from his view of the platform via jumbo screens
nearby, it was clear to Mac that Nicolae [Carpathia, the Antichrist] had suffered
the massive head wound believers knew was coming.”

But in Father Elijah we can never be so sure of anything. All the
signs point towards the president of the Federation of European States being
the Antichrist, and in one confrontation with Elijah, the president seems to
confirm all those suspicions. Yet, even after that dramatic confrontation, O’Brien
writes:

Within the box of time a drama had been enacted. The final scenes were approaching,
but it might be that other births and deaths awaited this aging planet. Night
and day. Seed time and harvest. Thrones rising and falling. The Word and the
Antiword circling each other endlessly in a combat from which there was neither
escape, nor relief nor truce. As long as man remained man, there would arise
again and again the machinations of those who had no hope beyond the tactics
of worldly power; always they would kill the gentle in their desperate efforts
to rearrange the furniture on the stage. . . .

To the Desert

As Elijah meditates on these truths, his thoughts give way to a series of
visions:

He saw many scripts and many audiences. Palaces fell and the dwellings of
the humble rose again from the ruins. He saw a world covered with the activities
of the holy angels, and the songs of man feebly greeting them, as the morning
star greets the dawn. But he also saw dragons coiling about cities and devouring
wave upon wave of human souls who dwelt in them, as if the city of man were
the city of eternal strength. Cities built by men who would not be born for
another ten thousand years.

The ache and the futility of it hit him hard.

You see that time must have an end, said the voice.

Elijah begins to plead for God to hold back his hand of judgment, just as
Abraham pled for God’s forbearance towards Sodom and Gomorrah. But though
the voice argues with Elijah for a while, in the end it falls silent. And the
book concludes without any definitive answer being given to the question of
whether this is the end of time, or just another episode in the circling combat
of Word and Antiword. Even the name of the hero, intended to remind us of God’s
promise at the end of Malachi that Elijah will return before “the great
and terrible day of the Lord,” is not definitive—perhaps he is not
that Elijah.

This move might seem rather surprising. But that shift of place and tone I
mentioned earlier, which happens about four-fifths of the way through the book,
is a great clue. The setting of the novel moves from cosmopolitan Italy to the
countryside of Asia Minor around what was once the city of Ephesus. The apparatus
of the thriller is suddenly and completely discarded in favor of a picture of
desert spirituality; surveillance equipment gives way to fasts, meditations,
visions; James Bond yields to St. John of the Cross.

De gustibus non disputandum est, of course, but to my
taste this dramatic shift is an aesthetic failure—I sense the building
of an escape hatch for an author who has set up a conflict he doesn’t
know how to resolve. It makes me wonder if it was not a mistake for O’Brien
to take up the elements of the thriller in the first place.

Yet the book’s change of gears is illuminating in that it brings the
book’s literary form more into conformity with its author’s theology.
For if the End Times did indeed begin with the birth of the Messiah, and all
that remains is the Last Battle, then there is little point in reading the signs
of the times with the kind of scrutiny counseled by dispensationalist
theology. In O’Brien’s world, to engage in comparative studies of
Daniel, Mark 13, First and Second Thessalonians, and John’s Revelation
with the morning’s New York Times is a fruitless activity; one
would better serve oneself and God by withdrawing into contemplation, seeking
those texts’ ever-relevant disclosure of the spiritual structures that
have given shape to the world since Bethlehem’s manger and will continue
to do so until the last sands trickle through history’s glass.

The Dimming Earth

Moreover, it could be argued that not only the thriller but even the novel
itself is fundamentally inappropriate as a vehicle for conveying this eschatological
vision—that, as I said at the beginning, the Apocalypse cannot be narrated.
The novel is above all a realistic medium, devoted to representing as faithfully
and even minutely as possible the textures and themes of everyday life; yet
what Newman counsels, and O’Brien’s Elijah exemplifies, is a loss
of interest in those very everyday textures and themes, a dimming of the physical
eye so that the inner eye can grow sharper, more discerning of spiritual truth.
As the hymn has it,

Turn your eyes upon Jesus.
Look full on his wonderful face
And the things of earth will grow strangely dim
In the light of his glory and grace.

The lifeblood of realistic narrative is “the things of earth,”
that physical surround that for Newman is but “the covering which lies
over the face of the world.” Perhaps now, in what we might call “normal
history,” that covering reliably reveals at least the basic outlines of
the way the world truly is; perhaps now, then, we have reason to attend to the
details of the created order. But the onset of the Apocalypse suggests, if indeed
it does not promise, the collapse of the normal, an ever-growing sense that
the covering now obscures the face of the world and must be torn away.

Christian theology has always depended on the distinction between general
and special revelation—God’s two books, Nature and Scripture—but
the last pages of Scripture suggest that the book of Nature will one day be
closed, and closed forever. (Thus Revelation 6:14, when the sky rolls up like
a scroll.) If the first pages of Scripture describe for us the making of the
greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night, its last
pages tell us that “they will need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord
God will be their light.”

The transformation of genre that occurs near the end of Father Elijah
suggests that this closing of Nature’s book will be accomplished gradually—that
“the things of earth will grow strangely dim” in preparation for
the Second Advent of the one who will enlighten the eternal City. Or, to use
Newman’s metaphor, the prayerful and discerning Christians will come to
realize that the “covering” we call Nature now hides more than it
reveals, and must be lifted—and that prayer, fasting, and meditation are
the powers that lift it.

In The Last Battle, the conclusion to the Narnia series,
C. S. Lewis has Aslan bring the chronicle of Narnia itself to a close.
“All the stars were falling,” he writes. “Aslan had called
them home.” Soon thereafter, Aslan commands the Time-giant to “make
an end”; the Giant extends his arm and crushes all light from the sun;
Peter, the High King, closes and locks the great Door; and Narnia is no more.

The children and their friends live now and always in Aslan’s country,
and for a few pages—pages that are not, I believe, among the more successful
in the stories—Lewis sketches for us what Aslan’s country is like.
But it can be only a sketch. Aslan utters his famous final words: “The
term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning.”
And then the final paragraph:

And as he spoke he no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things
that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot
write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most
truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only
the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their
adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last
they were beginning Chapter 1 of the Great Story, which no one on earth has
ever read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the
one before.

Say No More

I have spoken of one book closing, yielding forever to another; Lewis writes
rather that what we thought was a book, or a even series of books, is but the
beginning of another, and an infinite, tale. Lewis is paying a massive debt
here, but not primarily to John the Revelator (as the old song calls him) but
to Dante the poet. For there are different ways for the world to end—just
as, Eliot teaches us in “Little Gidding,” there are several places
that are the world’s end.

For the earthly friends of Aslan who die in a train accident, this world ends
and the door into Narnia is forever closed; for Dante, the unveiling of the
cosmic hierarchies concludes with a vision of Divine Love which, in a different
way, brings his world to an end. He is able to stammer out, fitfully,
some fragments of vision, and among his last is that of a book—a codex,
not a scroll, and therefore with many freely open pages that are yet bound together:

I saw how it [that is, Eternal Light] contains within its depths

All things bound in a single book by love

Of which creation is the scattered leaves;

But while he can tell us that his “heart leaped up in joy” at
what was revealed to him, he soon can say no more of it—the “inexpressibility
topos,” as the great medievalist E. R. Curtius called it, the
ritual confession of the powerlessness of words. And then, when he thinks that
all has been revealed to him, there is a last burst of enlightenment at which
the poet, now utterly overwhelmed, falls silent.

We hear nothing of his return to the world of the living, no reflections on
his marvelous journey; instead, we leave him at the world’s end, where
words are not merely inadequate but rather impossible. If, as we draw closer
and closer to the consummation of history or the limits of created being, our
standard forms of narrative expression grow increasingly suspect, once those
doors have been closed and locked, expression simply and utterly ceases.

In the end (a common phrase, but heavier than usual in this context) Dante
may be our best guide to these vexing matters: He knows when to shut up. Generally
speaking, we are not aware of anything that is intrinsically, necessarily, beyond
our ability to speak of it. Only someone like Wittgenstein, whose mystical temperament
was not wholly unlike Dante’s, could think to say, “That of which
we cannot speak, we must pass over in silence”—and even Wittgenstein
has typically been understood to be making, there, a comment on philosophical
method, rather than confessing awe in the face of a world that dwarfs the resources
of language.

In fact, I believe, Wittgenstein was speaking both of philosophy’s
limits and the limits of expressive representation; and if we take
Wittgenstein as we should, we will not only be shamed before the richness of
the daily world, we will recognize the futility, even the frivolity, of trying
to tell anyone anything about the world’s end. Perhaps, then, Roz Chast
has shown us the best we can do: It’s a-comin’, and it’s gonna
be big. •

“The Inexpressible Apocalypse” is a revised version of Jacobs’s
address to Touchstone’s 2003 conference, “The Time Is Near: The
Apocalyptic Imagination in an Age of Anxiety.”

A Plague of Denial

by Alan Jacobs

In the Left Behind books, the followers of the Antichrist seem
to know who he is, but think he is going to win. I must say that this
notion seems strange to me. I cannot, I find, imagine a Satan who does
not employ deceit, or people who are not pleased to be deceived in order
to place themselves on the side of the angels (as they think it).

I find myself meditating on the Old Testament prefiguring of the great
Judgments to come: the plagues visited upon Egypt in the time of Moses.
Again and again, when it seems impossible for Pharaoh to miss the message,
he misses it. Denial may not be just a river in Egypt, as the saying goes,
but in the book of Exodus it seems to be an Egyptian malady.

This kind of denial is often found in literary treatments of imminent
catastrophe. In the Lord of the Rings, for instance, when Theoden
King of Rohan refuses to accept that open war is upon him and his people,
or in the Harry Potter books when Cornelius Fudge, the Minister
of Magic, steadfastly denies that Lord Voldemort has returned until it
is simply impossible to evade the truth any longer.

I would like to claim that no work of recent narrative art exposes this
kind of denial more powerfully than that shocking, offensive, and (to
me) deeply moving film Magnolia. The movie is best known for
its introduction, two hours into a mostly sordid story of various forms
of abusiveness, of a plague of frogs.

The frogs raining from the skies and splattering onto car windshields
and asphalt, and crashing through skylights, and thumping cacophonously
onto roofs and gas station canopies, are portrayed as a way for God—or
Someone, Something Up There—to arrest the attention of people who
are ruining their own lives and the lives of those around them. Hours
before the frogs fall from the sky, it’s just rain that’s
falling—though in torrents—and people sit in their living
rooms or lie in their bedrooms or half-recline in their cars and softly
sing: “It’s not going to stop / ’Till you wise up.”

But they don’t wise up, most of them. Even when it’s just
rain pouring down, it does so hour after hour, in a way quite remarkable
for southern California. And long before the rain began, a young African-American
boy had rapped to Jim—the cop who, for all practical purposes, is
the hero of this story—“When the sunshine don’t work,
the Good Lord bring the rain in.”

Yet no one seems to notice the conditions; they always have their backs
to the windows; turned inward, eyes downcast or vacant, they continue
to eat away at their own guts, oblivious to the external world, muttering
the lyrics to a song whose force they do not seem to feel. Only the crashing
of frogs onto windshields and roofs and through windows and skylights—and
in one case, right onto a man’s upturned face—is sufficient
to shake at least some of them from their self-referential stupors.

I cannot conceive that this pattern of deceit and self-deceit, this
way we have of wearing deep grooves of untruth into our bodies, souls,
and spirits, will end until the world does.

Alan Jacobs is Professor of English at Wheaton College in Illinois. His books include A Theology of Reading (Westview Press), A Visit to Vanity Fair and Other Moral Essays (Brazos Press), and Shaming the Devil: Essays in Truthtelling (Eerdmans).

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Touchstone is a Christian journal, conservative in doctrine and eclectic in content, with editors and readers from each of the three great divisions of Christendom—Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox.

The mission of the journal and its publisher, The Fellowship of St. James, is to provide a place where Christians of various backgrounds can speak with one another on the basis of shared belief in the fundamental doctrines of the faith as revealed in Holy Scripture and summarized in the ancient creeds of the Church.